Not forgetting that if you’re more of a local business / market, include your area:

Home Repair Munich

Top Tip: Also, find keywords that are similar to the main one you want to use (a thesaurus will come in handy) and include them. This will help improve the chances of catching ‘searches’ that don’t include your main keyword but something close to it.

SEO Basics: Keywords in action

Okay, you’ve chosen your keywords, now it’s time to put them directly in your article – ensuring that the ‘main’ keyword is mentioned in the following areas:

Article Heading

Page title

Page URL

Content

Meta description.

But first, select the MAIN keyword or keyword phrase. The one you believe will be most searched for.

Let’s select: Home Repair

This is the two word phrase we want to ensure is repeated several times throughout the article – because our research shows that ‘home repair’ is the most searched term for our market.

Top Tip: When writing your headline, it is best to put the keyword at the front. For example: Home Repair Cheats for the Everyday Handyman

Then make sure your HTML tags are the same: <Title>Home Repair Cheats for the Everyday Handyman</Title>

Now let’s look at the body copy (content) you want to include:

“Welcome! This site is packed full of simple tips and techniques that anyone can perform with the most common equipment.

This isn’t about ignoring regulations; it’s about using smart shortcuts that will save you money, time and energy.

All while getting the job done right!”

Do you feel that that is okay for SEO?

Of course it isn’t, otherwise, we wouldn’t be here!

… it actually isn’t long enough. Ideally you will have a minimum of 300 words – we’re only at 45. An optimum page size is 500-3000 words (content is king).

… where are our keywords? Home repair isn’t even mentioned.

… no headlines.

… no images.

… no links.

So first, let’s look at where to put our keywords and how to break it up so we include good, relevant headlines. I’ll bold every keyword so it’s clear.

DON’T FORGET: Make sure the page’s URL also contains the keyword! And ideally, start off with your keyword.

Start with a main headline that has a minimum of 40 characters. Note that headlines marked with <h1> and <h2> HTML tags are more effective:

HOME REPAIR CHEATS FOR THE HANDYMAN AND DIY WOMAN

Include a relevant <IMAGE> and make sure that its <ALT> tags contain your keyword / phrase. Basically, if the website doesn’t download your image or the browser image is disabled, the text within the <ALT> tags will be displayed. If possible, also link the image to a relevant page (or your or another site).

Home repair stressing you out? It doesn’t have to.

Welcome to Do- It-Yourself-Cheats.com, your one stop DIY location.

This home renovation site is packed full of simple tips, cheats and techniques that any home owner or renter can perform with the most common tools and materials.

This isn’t about home repair that ignores building regulations; it’s about using smart shortcuts and proven techniques when you’re doing some house remodelling. Home repair cheats that will save you money, time and energy.

Include a sub headline featuring the keyword(s):

HOME REPAIR TO ANY HOW-TO-PROJECT

In fact, for any how to project, Do- It-Yourself-Cheats.com gives you the professional how to knowledge you need 24 hours a day!

All direct from the real-world experience of professional handymen and women, inspectors, architects, builders, organisers and inventors. Not forgetting anyone and everyone with very clever DIY ideas that come with a healthy dose of common sense.

And all to help you get your home repair job done right!

Include another sub headline featuring the keyword(s):

HOME REPAIR TOOLS OF THE TRADE

You may also want to include another relevant <IMAGE> (again making sure that its “alt tags” contain your keyword / phrase).

Of course before we start on any home repair, there are a few things to keep in mind.

Sometimes the easiest fix is the most obvious. For example, if your lamp stops working, try the light bulb first, the power plug second, etc.

Make a list of all the people you may need in an emergency, handypersons, electricians, plumbers, etc.

Be reasonable with what you know. Do not attempt dangerous repairs and modifications without any experience – call the professionals.

If it isn’t familiar to you, don’t rush. The old saying measure twice, cut once is true for a reason, especially DIY home repair.

And let’s not forget your tools.

Make sure the tools you buy and use are versatile, portable, readily available and durable.

So before you start, make sure you have the essentials:

Screwdriver

Crescent Wrench

Channel-lock pliers

Pipe wrench

Hammer

Utility knife

Chisel

Power drill

Hand saw

Staple gun

Caulking gun

Tape measure

Okay, we can stop there… that’s a good 335 words, so just past our 300 word minimum.

One additional thing to consider is linking to other websites and/or within your own site. When linking, use keywords in the text of page links – this can help enhance your page rank.

Finally, you’re nearly there.

But before you post your page, let’s look at three things:

1.Your Description Meta tag, which is used to specify page descriptions.

Search engines display the information you put into your Description Meta tag in their search results, making it very important. Especially if your result is right next to a competitor – your visitor will choose the one with the page description that they like most.

And yes, it should also have your favourite keywords!

Our example, embedded in our HTML, will look something like this:

<metaname=”description”content=”Home repair cheats for everyone wanting to save time, money and energy!”/>

2.One keyword phrase for each page

This basically means it is best to not have every page (or post) use the same keyword / keyword phrase. So we would use ‘home repair’ only on one page. Our next page may use ‘do it yourself’ or simply get more specific ‘toilet repair’, etc.

3.Keyword density

This is the measure of the ‘relative frequency’ of your keyword within the copy of your page. If you use ‘repair’ five times in a page with 100 words, your keyword density is 5%. Ideally you want to hit between 2 to 5 per cent. Too low the search engine may ignore the page, too high it may activate its spam filter.

In our example, our keyword (home repair) appeared 12 times (not counting variations), giving us a keyword density (for 335 words) of 3.60%, which is ideal.

Once all the pieces are in place, you can better connect with your audience, achieve higher search engine rankings, and cost-effectively promote your business by having your own customers do (a fair bit of) the work for you.

By combining SEO with your Social Media strategy, the benefits are virtually unlimited.

SEO is a process to help increase visitors to your website (using organic ((natural or un-paid)) search results) via the listings on search engines. Each results list shows and ranks content on what it considers most relevant and/or important to users.

How to get up the search ranks?

This ranking is achieved by two main factors, what is On-Page and what is Off-Page.

On Page SEO is anything that can be done ‘on the page’ to optimise its relevancy. So good titles, descriptions and appropriate key words.

Off Page SEO is basically ‘link building’; where a large effort is made to have links come back to your site and help build its reputation.

All combining to help ensure your site is at its optimum when ‘scanned’ by a search engine, which uses complex algorithms to search (and index) each web page for specific content including:

Words (keywords). Each search engine scans every word in your website to help produce results. For example, if your site contains the word ‘holiday’ and someone searches for ‘holiday’ the search engine will then list websites that contain that word.

Titles. You won’t often see them as they are in your web pages’ code, e.g: <title>Europe’s Best Holidays</title> but they are very important as they provide a quick and descriptive summary of the page.

Links. Each link between web pages can be seen as one ‘recommending’ another page to users. So if one page has a lot of links to it that will look good to a search engine.

Words in links. By linking a specific word or phrase that is relevant to the link, the search engine will connect those words with the site. For example, if you have a hyperlink ‘travel Germany’ that links to ‘EuropeanHolidays.com’, the search engine will better rate ‘EuropeanHolidays.com’ on any search result that looks for ‘travel’ and ‘Germany’.

Reputation. This is all about producing consistently fresh, engaging content and higher numbers of quality links, which rate higher in search engine algorithms and are then deemed ‘more important’ to users.

When the above is done right, your website can rank higher in search results, which means more people see your site.

So what elements can you use to help your site rank better?

Keywords

These are any words and phrases that are unique to each page and the product, theme, etc, and which you believe your customers are searching for. It can also be best to ignore keywords that are too generic as they will get lost amongst all the online ‘noise’, for example, instead of the too generic ‘widget’, use a more descriptive element such as ‘acrylic self-binding widget’.

Keywords are what you will / should design your site around.

Metadata and metatags

Once your keywords are selected, it’s time to customise and make unique the metadata (embedded descriptive information) on every page.

Metadata is coded into what are termed ‘metatags’.

The more ‘generic’ and ‘same’ metadata you use the more a search engine will give you a worse ranking.

TOP TIP: Keep metatags simple and concise as some search engines ignore long descriptions and too many keywords. They may even rank you lower if you repeat a keyword too often. With this in mind, prioritize the most important keywords first in any list as a search engine may only read a specific amount of keywords.

Content and New Content

The old saying that ‘content is king’ is absolutely true. That’s why you should keep it as unique and as updated as you can. It’s also better on average to have more on each page than less.

Always do your best to add new content – and link it within your own site – as much as possible, this gives search engines another reason to come back and rescan your site.

Perhaps the hardest, most time-consuming part of the SEO process, link building is all about establishing inbound links from other sites. The more sites that link directly to your site the better, as the search engine ‘assumes’ an importance to the site being linked to.

It is also best to have links coming from sites that have similar keywords to yours, so a site about ‘bread’ that links back to your ‘bread’ page will be seen as more relevant and therefore better rated.

AND A WARNING: Spamming.

When a keyword is used repeatedly it is called ‘metatag spamming’ or ‘keyword loading’ (specifically when you use irrelevant words such as ‘sex’ or ‘porn’ that you feel will increase traffic to your site) and a search engine can penalize you for it. You should also be careful about using someone else’s trademark.

Additional spamming methods to avoid include: hidden links or hidden text, duplicate content on multiple pages, intentional misspelling of web site names and popular keywords, and using link farms.

By helping to ensure your site is accessible to, and optimized for, a search engine (including Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.), SEO can help your site obtain higher-ranking placement in search result pages.

But keep in mind:

Search engines constantly change their algorithms and this means what works one day may not work the next. Good SEO has to keep up with these changes.

SEO may not be appropriate to your site and you may achieve more by looking at other marketing strategies.

When it comes to SEO, it is impossible to guarantee the 1st spot. If any SEO specialist says they can, be skeptical.

But when SEO is done right and inline with your overall marketing strategy, with accurate research, quality content and strong link building, the benefits to your business can be significant.

Author: Paul Treleaven

Find part 1 of this article here. Visit soon to read Part 3: SEO and Social Media!